The role nearly didn’t happen for the actor playing it
Andrew Scott says a gay actor might not have been cast as Ian Charleson a decade ago.
By The Weekend · · 6 min read
"Elsinore" opened the BFI London Film Festival this week dramatizing a death that happened 36 years ago: the actor Ian Charleson died of AIDS in 1990, days after finishing a run as Hamlet at the National Theatre while visibly ill. The film's star, Andrew Scott, said on the festival carpet that he doubts the role would have gone to an openly gay actor "even 10 years ago." That claim is checkable against what British film actually did with AIDS stories for three decades — and the record backs him up more than it contradicts him.
A stage door keeper of 46 years became a casting choice, not a footnote
The clearest evidence of what "Elsinore" is trying to do sat in the audience at the Royal Festival Hall on opening night, not on screen. Director Simon Stone and star Scott brought out the real people behind the film's characters: Dr. Margaret Johnson, an actual HIV/AIDS physician from the late 1980s, played by Olivia Colman; Linda Tolhurst, the National Theatre's stage door keeper for 46 years, played by Monica Dolan; and Charleson's sister, Lizzie. That's a specific choice — a film about a man's death from AIDS structured not around the illness as spectacle but around the people who kept functioning around him: a doctor, a doorkeeper, a sister. BFI artistic director Kristy Matheson described the film's organizing idea as "radical care" — people doing unglamorous, continuous work for someone who is dying, rather than a single dramatic rescue.
The National Theatre is 100 meters from where it played
Geography did some of the storytelling that dialogue didn't need to. The Royal Festival Hall screening sat roughly 100 meters from the National Theatre stage where Charleson actually performed Hamlet in 1989, ill with the condition that would kill him within months. Stone called it "a very quintessentially London experience" — the sort of staging coincidence that film festivals rarely get to claim literally rather than as marketing language. The proximity matters for one reason beyond atmosphere: it's a reminder that Charleson's final performance was public. Audiences in 1989 watched him lose weight and lose stamina across a run, without official confirmation of why, in a city whose theater community largely understood what was happening and largely didn't say so publicly. The film's reconstruction depends on that gap between what was visible and what was spoken.
British film treated AIDS as subtext for most of three decades
The history here isn't abstract. British and American cinema produced a handful of landmark AIDS narratives in the first wave after the crisis began — "Philadelphia" in 1993, "Longtime Companion" in 1990 — but those films largely cast straight actors in the lead roles, a pattern that held for decades afterward. Tom Hanks won an Oscar playing a gay lawyer dying of AIDS; the straight-actor-plays-gay-dying-man structure became, if anything, a recognized award pathway rather than an exception. Openly gay actors in the intervening thirty years more often found themselves advised, explicitly or by implication, that leading-role visibility and public sexuality didn't mix — a dynamic documented repeatedly in actors' own later accounts of their early careers, though rarely by the actors while they were still auditioning.
Scott's own career is a useful marker of the shift. He became known publicly as an out actor well into an already-successful career — his breakout crossover moment came via a supporting role in "Fleabag" in 2019 — and has spoken before about weighing when and how that fact would affect the parts he was offered. His comment on the "Elsinore" carpet wasn't a complaint about the industry in the abstract; it was a specific claim that a biographical lead role, built around a man's death from AIDS and his sexuality, is a part that industry casting logic would plausibly have routed toward a straight actor a decade ago, award-season prestige notwithstanding. Nothing in the film's reception contradicts that: critics at Telluride, where "Elsinore" premiered before Toronto and London, singled out Scott's performance for the kind of unguarded intimacy that casting conventional wisdom used to treat as a risk when the actor's own life matched the character's.
The anniversary the festival didn't build the program around
There's a version of this story that leads with coincidence: London Film Festival's 70th edition opening with a film about a death inside a London theater landmark, on a date tied to nothing official. Matheson told Deadline the festival had discussed building a program around the anniversary number and dropped it — "the films took over" — which means "Elsinore" wasn't chosen as a symbolic nod to a round number. It was chosen, by the selection committee's own account, because they "fell so deeply in love" with it. That's worth noting because award-season placement decisions are frequently retrofitted with symbolic explanations after the fact; here the festival's own director pre-empted that reading and declined it.
What the film doesn't resolve: who the audience for AIDS narratives is now
The catch is generational, not financial. "Elsinore" arrives at a moment when the audience who lived through the period it depicts — British theatergoers and filmgoers who remember 1989 as a year when a friend, colleague or stage door keeper quietly knew something nobody confirmed — is aging out of the core cinema-going demographic. The audience the film needs for awards traction and box office is largely one generation removed from direct memory of the crisis it dramatizes. That's not unprecedented — "Philadelphia" worked for an audience with living memory in 1993 — but it does mean the film's commercial fate depends on whether a story about 1989's particular silence lands with viewers for whom AIDS is primarily historical rather than something they navigated personally. Festival enthusiasm from Telluride through Toronto to London doesn't settle that question; it only means critics and programmers, a narrower and older-skewing audience than the ticket-buying public, responded strongly.
The honest unresolved question
Scott's claim that casting would have gone differently a decade ago is impossible to prove counterfactually — there's no controlled experiment for who gets offered which role in which year. What can be said is that the claim is consistent with a documented pattern (straight actors playing dying gay characters as an award-season convention) and that its retirement, if it has in fact been retired, happened recently enough that Scott, now in his late forties, frames it as a change within his own career rather than before it. Whether "Elsinore" represents a permanent shift in who gets cast in roles like Charleson's, or a single high-profile exception inside an industry that still defaults to older habits for less prestigious projects, isn't something one film and one festival opening can answer.
Who was Ian Charleson? A Scottish actor best known for "Chariots of Fire," who died in 1990 of AIDS-related illness days after completing a celebrated run as Hamlet at London's National Theatre.
Where did "Elsinore" premiere? Telluride Film Festival in 2026, followed by Toronto, with its European premiere opening the BFI London Film Festival.